Compensation of laser frequency tuning nonlinearity of a long range OFDR using deskew filter

We present a simple and effective method to compensate the optical frequency tuning nonlinearity of a tunable laser source (TLS) in a long range optical frequency-domain reflectometry (OFDR) by using the deskew filter, where a frequency tuning nonlinear phase obtained from an auxiliary interferometer is used to compensate the nonlinearity effect on the beating signals generated from a main OFDR interferometer. The method can be applied to the entire spatial domain of the OFDR signals at once with a high computational efficiency. With our proposed method we experimentally demonstrated a factor of 93 times improvement in spatial resolution by comparing the results of an OFDR system with and without nonlinearity compensation. In particular we achieved a measurement range of 80 km and a spatial resolution of 20 cm and 1.6 m at distances of 10 km and 80 km, respectively with a short signal processing time of less than 1 s for 5 × 10(6) data points. The improved performance of the OFDR with a high spatial resolution, a long measurement range and a short process time will lead to practical applications in the real-time monitoring, test and measurement of fiber optical communication networks and sensing systems.